It happens that I returned to our beloved motherland, after a short visit to New York, in time to watch our government roll out a hero’s welcome for Vladimir Putin. On the evening of the day I landed, jet-lagged and bleary-eyed after a non-stop Air India flight, I saw our Prime Minister go to the airport and embrace the Russian dictator. When Putin stepped onto Indian soil, troupes of dancers performed for him before he sped off in the same car as our Prime Minister.
It was not just our government who greeted Putin as if he were a conquering hero, our media did as well. Our ‘independent’ news channels competed to be more servile and effusive in their praise for a man who, in my opinion, is no hero at all.
Silence on Navalny
Not only has he invaded Ukraine illegally, he has also broken all the rules of war. At home, he has treated his opponents with cold-blooded cruelty. In a long, fawning interview with the dictator, conducted by a major Indian news channel, I heard not one question about Alexei Navalny, who died last year in a freezing prison cell below the Arctic circle simply for demanding democratic rights in Russia.
Putin’s government said he died because of his poor health, but it is important to remember that before he was sent to jail, Navalny was poisoned with Novichok by mysterious assassins. This military-grade poison is severely restricted and available only to those people who run the Russian state. After spending many months recovering in Germany, this extraordinarily brave man returned to his country to continue his crusade for democracy. Navalny was the most prominent of the Russian dictator’s challengers. So after his death, the opposition to Putin slowly lost steam.
You may have noticed that your columnist is someone who truly cherishes liberal democracy. And is someone who believes that India’s greatest achievement after we stopped being a British colony is that we have succeeded in preserving and nurturing our democratic freedoms. So, it hurt deeply last week to see the world’s largest democracy bend the knee before a man whose contempt for democracy is no secret. He has not just crushed his opponents inside Russia, he has pursued them in other countries and used all the tricks he learned in his KGB days to get rid of them.
It is this man before whom India genuflected last week. What turned my stomach was to see how our private television channels grovelled like toadies. What is wrong with us? Why do we not see that as a country that has managed to remain democratic for most of our years as a modern nation, we must not pay homage to dictators who bomb children’s hospitals and torture prisoners of war. This too in a war that happened only because Ukraine chose to embrace Western democracy instead of remaining the vassal state it was in the Soviet Union.
It is generally believed by most Indian liberals that Jawaharlal Nehru’s greatest contribution was that he kept the flame of democracy alive in India when it died in most of the countries around us. This is true. But last week brought back memories for me of Nehru’s failure to align India’s interests with other democratic countries. The non-aligned movement that he co-founded ended up being mostly a club of dictators and tyrants. It was believed that it was in India’s ‘national interest’ to align with decolonised countries and so it did not matter if they had all become petty tyrannies.
Beyond Realpolitik
There are those who say that we have become so cosy with Russia again because this is ‘real politic’. That it is in India’s interest to do business with whoever we need to if we get what we want. I take a different view. I believe it is in India’s interest to stand up for the values that, for us, are foundational. Democracy, secularism, freedom of speech, the right to worship how we like. It is when we stand up for these values that we have the moral authority to speak out against injustice and despotism.
We may have benefitted from buying cheap Russian oil and buying Russian weapons, but surely these things can be done without welcoming Putin as a hero at a time when he is shunned by countries that believe his invasion of Ukraine was evil and illegal. Let me put it another way.
If China was to support Pakistan in a forcible takeover of Kashmir, what would we do? Would we not expect other democratic countries to stand by us? Why would they if we refuse to stand by Ukraine instead of by the man who invaded it? Speaking of Ukraine, let me add that I would have liked India to have been more robustly on its side, but I can understand that this was not possible because of our need for Russian oil. This I fully accept was a matter of national interest.
What I cannot understand is treating a warmonger like a hero. I have always been a patriotic and proud Indian. I spent my formative years in that euphoric time immediately after the British Raj ended, when we were prepared to face deprivation, destitution and all odds to build a democratic India. So, it saddens me to admit that last week was a rare week when I did not feel so proud to be Indian.